Comfort

As a child,I can remember laying in the sunshine that came in the big picture windows in the living room. I would lay there on my tummy reading Sunday morning comics when I had successfully pried them away from a sibling. My brother liked to read the whole paper intact, I just wanted the comics and the Parade Magazine. Several of us enjoyed that same spot, twice as warm there as any place in the room. By the time I was in high school my brother bought his own paper and Sunday mornings I was in church, but I remember the spot and the struggle with great fondness.

My sister and I shared a small room growing up. There were no private places in my small home, and finding a place of your own required creativity. There was an old dresser sitting at a right angle, across from the heat vent in the corner of the room. If you sat with your back to the dresser and your feet on the heat vent you were almost invisible from the door way. This is where I would read. For hours and hours I sat in my own little world with Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Little Women, Donna Parker and Anne of Green Gables. Later, my companions changed to Tolkien, DE Stevenson, Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and more. Still, for as long as I lived at home, long after my sister had grown up, married and moved on, I sat in that corner, imagining I was all alone in the world.

I was haunted as a child by demons in the dark. Many nights I would wake terrified, at first needing to be comforted, later learning some comfort techniques of my own. Many nights as I would lay in bed with my heart pounding, sure that at any moment one of the many terrors that would dominate my thoughts was about to overtake me, I would imagine the drive up the driveway to my grandparents home. Their driveways was dirt, filled with many ruts and holes, half a mile long. After eight hours in a station wagon with my family, when my dad made the turn, my heart leaped. Even today I can describe the drive, the mailbox, the pond and the trees and the barns. That drive took me away from fear and brought me to a different place, filled with adventure and belonging.

I am confident that the need for comfort is the essence of the God given need for relationship. I believe God is aware of our need to feel that sense of security and safety and wants us to do so. I think we find comfort in habits and behaviors and even in relationships in ways that may have started from a genuine need and the best we could do at the time, and stayed to become subconscious responses that keep us from making wiser choices now. For example, a have a child who processes stress or boredom or even deep thought by twirling his hair. I would ask where on earth this habit comes from, but I have noticed that when I am stressed or agitated or trying hard to think of a solution to a problem, I am constantly rearranging my hair! I know where he got it, I just really didn't notice that I do it, until I noticed that he did.

I am confident that God is not in the heavenly realms grieving over my hair therapy, or my son's either for that matter. Unfortunately, this isn't the only behavior I have developed over the years to cope. Some of them are more destructive to me personally, and interfere with my relationship with God. I am reminded of the story of Jacob leaving Laban's home and Rachel's removal of her father's household gods. She must have known the God of Israel, but she depended on the comfort she had from those life long sources. It seems like a silly story until I reflect on the damage some of my own household gods have done.

I still enjoy the paper in the sunshine, I still prefer to read all curled up away from others and I still sometimes lay in bed in the still quiet hours and the darkness and remember my grandparents driveway. I guess I will go on messing with my hair from time to time, but I am praying that God will gently pry the household gods from my hands and remind me that He is my comfort and strength, a very present help and trouble and more than enough.